1901 / VMware Horizon View (Standard Edition)

[Brandon Cleland]

We are currently running Unidesk 2.10 w/ Horizon View 6.2.2 (Standard Edition). Curious if there are any other companies out there that have upgraded to App Layering 1901? I know VMware recommends using Instant Clones vs. Composer, but with the Standard Edition we don't have this capability. Is there any other way to publish/create non-persistent VM's with our setup?

 

Thank you

 

BC

[Jimmy Bouma-Holtrop]

That's my exact setup (Horizon 6 Standard and App Layering 19.01). App Layering also supports linked-clone machines, which is what I use.

[Josh James]

We're on Horizon 7.3.2 standard and linked clones with composer.  It has been working great.  Came from old Unidesk and view 5/6.   Running all non persistent VMs with a full user layer.

[Brandon Cleland]

Curious by introducing Composer do you get any boot storm issues? Believe this was the big sell with 2.x back when we implemented in 2014. Just started reading the official Citrix documentation. Is the vSphere connector config the only thing needed for the appliance to be able to communicate with vCenter and View? . Did you setup/install the new platform or did you get a company to help out?

 

BC

[Jimmy Bouma-Holtrop]

We did have boot storm issues sometimes, but that can be minimized by leaving all machines up and running instead of having it boot them as people log in. We also were running off of an older SAN, moving to a SAN with all flash and 10gig networking has removed all those issues for us. 

 

I think the vSphere connector config is all you need. I and my senior tech did the setup/install. He has a ton of VMWare experience and I had several years of Unidesk 2 experience. 

[Josh James]

We don't have a SAN but we do have everything on newer servers with pure SSD and 10Gb.   We just leave the VMs running at all times.   Because of the full user layer, we only need one pool and the desktops themselves are all non-persistent so we actually reduced the total number of VMs needed by upgrading (mix of persistent/non persistent before)

 

I did the setup myself.  Our environment is pretty simple and I was definitely making things more complex than they needed to be when I was trying to wrap my head around it in planning.   Depending on your scale, you really only need to deploy the appliance, give it a good fast file share with correct permissions (I spun up a 2016 VM on the same box), and then work on getting your gold image going.   The ELM publishes a processed VM for you to use as your template for the linked clones in composer.    It was a little painful to wait for each layer to build / process during the initial testing and troubleshooting but that has been improved (fast servers with SSD will help you here too). 

 

Not sure how big of a deployment you're looking at or if you're set up with a SAN.   We've opted to go without a SAN (partially due to budget) and for our needs, it also wasn't worth the trouble and potential slowdown of using another method to make the user layer store be redundant.  I just replicate the whole VM nightly so if the physical box holding it blows up I just fire up the replica and people only lose a day of settings and things they stored on the desktop which they're discouraged from doing anyway.  Documents and such are redirected with GPO.  The ELM only needs to be online for layer editing/publishing so it just needs to be backed up.

[Brandon Cleland]

Just had a discussion with an Account Manager and they informed us that App layering is part of the Citrix Select pricing model now. Almost fell out of my seat when I saw what the $$$ was for 320 licenses. Curious how this makes it easier for a current customer running Unidesk 2.10 to migrate to this new platform - what's the benefit? Seems priced similar to VMware offerings.

 

BC